The Pension.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 1, 2 January 1902, Page 18

The Pension.

Another year gone 1 Another twelve months nearer to the time when we shall be able to receive the old age pension and roll in the capacious lap of luxury until death do us depart from our solemn six-and-six a week. It must have been of a pensioner that Sprague wrote : ' Through life's dark road, his sordid way he wends, An incarnation of fat dividends.' When we die at last, our friends will be spared the additional grief of having to fee the newspaper man for our death notice. Neither will there be any need to ask other papers to ' please copy.' A third standard schoolboy is not more pleased at finding a substantial cigar-stump than the average editor is at being the first to be ' sorry to record the early demise ' of an old age pensioner ; and the man that wields the shears in other officer has ' a heye like a 'awk ' for any such records. I have found out at last why it is that newspapers are so keen on pensioners' deaths. It comes to this : Every pensioner that fails to draw his pension on account of death saves the country some £18 a year. And as all of these are likely to remain dead for some considerable time, the saving amounts, in a century or so, to a tolerably round sum, which the curious can estimate each for himself.

I have it on good authority that some of these ' dear departeds ' don't at all relish the present arrangement concerning their pensionmoney. Among them are many who want a drink now more than ever they did, and a Spiritualist friend of mine avers that it is 1 somethink orf ul ' on pension days to hear the freedom and frequency and sulphureousness of the ' langwidge ' which they use towards Mr. Seddon for not having made some provision in the Act whereby their six-and-six a week could be sent on to their present address. It is illegal in New Zealand at the present time for a dead pensioner to draw his money, but let us fervently hope that things will be changed before our' day comes, and that the American system may be introduced, by which State pensioners of the War of Independence continue to draw their payments, unquestioned, down to the present hour. A man gets the pension now because he is old and because he has been of service to the Colony. Well, most of us are getting older all the time ; and, as for some of us, the very best service we could render to the Colony would be to die and go to our place. Anglers. The week before last I stated that, when an angler had paid his fee to the Acclimatisation Society, he was thereafter licensed to lie to any extent about his catches. I have since heard of a disciple of Isaac Walton who was very much given to that species of archery which is known as drawing the long-bow. He was engaged in attracting the attention of the company to an account of a pike that he had caught the day before, that weighed nineteen pounds. ' Pooh !' exclaimed a gentleman sitting near him, ' that ia nothing to the one I caught last week, which weighed twenty-Bix pounds.' ' Confound it, whispered the first angler to his neighbor, ' I wish I could catch my pike again ; I'd add ten pounds to him directly. 1